I was obviously going to have to give the engine subframe to someone else to be powder coated, but I didn't want them to blast all of the old stuff off and then find that some repairs were needed, so I carefully checked any evidence of rust to ensure everything was solid, and performed any repairs necessary. 

In order to do this I bought a sand blasting gun which came with some aluminium oxide and some soda. I was going to use the soda to clean up the engine and although it was effective it was really messy and so I decided not to use it and went with the alubrite and wire brush option instead (see earlier article). But for the frame the aluminium oxide was ideal. You do need to wear a mask though (both for face and breathing) as it still gets everywhere.

Prior to this exercise I'd already repaired a couple of things on the frame. I found that one of the mounts that supports the right hand wheel arch liner was rusted to the point where you could move it, so I had to mig weld it back on with some gap filling to ensure it was in the right place. Not one of my best welding exercises but it sufficed. I also had to repair the mounts for the handbrake cable in a couple of places.

Part way through fixing that mount. Access was difficult so I did the best I could;

And now onto blasting all of the various apparently rusty bits. The light grey bits here are bare metal. They just don't look like steel because the sand blasting leaves this dull looking finish on the parts.

These corner pieces are well known for getting very corroded so I was hoping I wasn't going to have to repair them, although they looked like they wouldn't be too hard to do if the need arose. Luckily though, they were fine:

After having blasted all of the rusty bits and verified it was just surface rust, I then took a random can of paint and covered the bare metal as it would be some time before the powder coating was done.

I won't repeat all the pics showing the black bits! So the frame was now ready for powder coating. One last job was to remove the assembly number from the subframe, and store it in a safe place along with all of the other fixings: